The Kronos Quartet's Heroic Effort

Sight-and-sound work commemorates the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I

ENLARGE

The Kronos Quartet performs a 40-minute sight-and-sound work called 'Beyond Zero: 1914-1918' to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.
Lenny Gonzalez

By

David Littlejohn

April 15, 2014 6:02 p.m. ET

Berkeley, Calif.

As a highlight of the Kronos Quartet's 40th-anniversary celebration—which also includes a five-CD boxed set, "Kronos Explorer Series" (Nonesuch)—Matías Tarnopolsky, director of the Cal Performances at University of California, Berkeley, commissioned (with the support of two other institutions) a 40-minute sight-and-sound work called "Beyond Zero: 1914-1918" to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. David Harrington, founder and artistic director of the string quartet, had been thinking along the same lines, and he engaged Serbian-born Aleksandra Vrebalov—who had done 10 works for Kronos over 18 years—to prepare a score (including recorded speeches and air-raid sirens) that would accompany a semiabstract, semidocumentary film assembled by Bill Morrison, who had done a similar work with the Kronos Quartet in 2012. "Beyond Zero" was first presented here earlier this month and will be performed later this year in Edinburgh; Rotterdam; Boulder, Colo.; and Liberty, Mo.

For all the heroic efforts of the composer, the filmmaker and the musicians, "Beyond Zero" didn't begin to do justice to the epic events it depicted and tried to evoke. No work of art could, although many artists have tried.

The film, which commands primary attention (although it would signify much less without the music) is made up primarily of short scenes from visibly decaying, century-old nitrate war footage that Mr. Morrison salvaged from the Library of Congress's Audio-Visual Conservation Center archives—scratched, blurred and rapidly disintegrating, like our memories of World War I. Recruits proudly parade, train in U.S. camps, ship off in liners. Soldiers run, fight and die on European battlefields (although most of these appear to be re-enactments, made for German propaganda purposes). Cannons are hauled into place and loaded, followed by dark skies full of smoke. Miserable Frenchmen wander aimlessly about the crumbled ruins of their towns. Trim airplanes fly in deft formations against picturesque clouds, then are seen plummeting in fiery spirals and crashing to earth. The bandage-wrapped wounded lie on hospital beds.

All of these disconnected, blurry, grainy clips are intruded on and interrupted by Mr. Morrison's own abstract cinematography. His colors, too, overlay the original black and white with a range of hues, mostly oranges and reds.

Although he made his movie after reading Ms. Vrebalov's score (they had studied the archival films together), there seemed to be almost no connection between them, or little of the programmatic "plot" of the score, which she described in an interview this month as a world "where everything goes to disintegration and abstraction and noise." A controlled, brilliantly single-voiced string quartet (Mr. Harrington and John Sherba on violins, Hank Dutt on viola—all members since the 1970s—and Sunny Yang on cello) grows radically faster, more shrill and uncoordinated, punctured by troubling dissonances, anguished swoops and painful combinations of notes presumably signifying the emotions of war. The work ends with the two violinists bonging softly on two hanging North Vietnamese artillery shells, at once funeral bells for the 10 million dead and a hopeless cry for a world without war.

The concert began with a half-hour medley of finding-your-seat music from recordings made in 1914-18, ranging from "Over There," "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" and John McCormack singing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" to a famous Giacomo Puccini aria of 1918 and a piece of Pablo Casals's first recording of a J.S. Bach cello suite in 1915. The half-hour that followed was filled with nine short and emotionally, sometimes historically pertinent works (Stravinsky, Ravel, Webern, even Rachmaninoff), most of them slow, sad, even funereal—with the unexpected interjection of a recording of Charles Ives himself playing and singing "They Are There," his surprisingly patriotic song of 1917, with the Kronos Quartet as his back-up band.

All of this added to the overall variety and pleasure of the evening, and displayed a tiny piece of the range of the Kronos Quartet's global new-music style so evident in the new boxed set, which makes use of music from around the world. But on the whole, it was a distraction from the purpose of the main event, summed up best in an eloquent, profoundly moving talk (and conversation with Mr. Tarnopolsky) on World War I by historian, journalist and Berkeley professor Mark Danner at a symposium on the war and the work two days earlier.

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